After the girl’s parents learned that she had got a boyfriend, they tried to persuade a gynaecologist to determine whetehr she was sexually active
A couple who claimed they just wanted to “make sure everything was alright” with their 15-year-old daughter after learning that she had a boyfriend have been prosecuted for attempting to force her to undergo a virginity test with a gynaecologist.
The girl, who is not being named for legal reasons, told the court that her father had slapped her several times in March 2025 after finding out that she had a boyfriend, before insisting on the medical test.
Public Prosecutor Sarah Huet from La Roche-sur-Yon, France, told Le Parisien that the young girl’s mother had been sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, suspended, for “inciting a minor to submit to an examination intended to prove her virginity,” while the father was charged not only with the same offence, but also with “failure of a parent to fulfill their legal obligations, thereby compromising the safety, health, morals, or education of their child.”
The man, a professional boxer, was also charged with “violence without causing injury,” and received a six-month suspended sentence with two years’ probation. He had insisted that the examination had been a perfectly harmless medical procedure. “I ordered to take her to the gynaecologist to make sure there wasn’t a problem,” he insisted.
His wife had defended him, saying that he had lost his temper because their daughter “hid things from us even though we trusted her, and he couldn’t take it.”
Ms Huet told the court: “For the virginity test, the intention alone is enough. She didn’t even need to see a gynaecologist,” adding, “the violence in no way constitutes parental discipline.”
When her parents told her that they were going to subject her to the test, the teenager purportedly had a panic attack and fainted.
A medical test to confirm virginity is completely illegal in France, and when contacted by the girl’s parents, the gynaecologist refused to carry out the procedure.
French President Emmanuel Macron had explicitly condemned so-called “virginity tests” in February 2020 as part of a series of moves against what he described as “Islamist separatism.” “In the Republic, one cannot require certificates of virginity to get married”, he said.
The World Health Organisation echoed his words, stressing that “virginity testing” is unscientific, violates human rights, and could potentially have harmful consequences for those who undergo it.
A group of French medical professionals condemned the practice as “barbaric, backward and totally sexist,” adding that “What should shock public opinion is not that the doctor writes such a certificate without any legal value, but that in 2020 the requirement of virginity is still so widespread.”
